An image forming apparatus is designed to directly receive a storage medium (e.g., a memory card), in which photographic images or the like captured by a digital camera are stored. The apparatus can read those images stored in the storage medium and allow a user to perform a predetermined operation to select and print out a desired image from among these images without the use of a personal computer.
The storage medium having a high storage capacity adopts a so-called directory structure (tree structure) file system so that a large quantity of images classified according to user's preference is stored in corresponding directories. To print a desired image, the user wants to easily search the desired image from among the large quantity of images stored in the storage medium.
Japanese patent publication 2005-174261-A discloses an image forming apparatus for selecting a directory in which a desired image is stored. The image forming apparatus to which a storage medium having a directory file system is mounted extracts, from plural images stored in directories, index images representing respective directories, and index prints those index images as print objects together with index numbers of the directories onto a sheet. Using the index-printed sheet, the user inputs the directory number into the image forming apparatus to select the directory in which the desired image would be stored, to thereby find the desired image.
However, if the directories are arranged to have a hierarchical structure of several levels, the user faces difficulty in searching the desired image because the user may not be able to know where the directory storing the desired image therein is located in the file system, i.e., how the directories are hierarchically structured.